


The Dead

by seraphim_grace



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Complete, Disjointed narrative, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mindfuck, No Major Character Death, POV First Person, POV Third Person, Recreational Drug Use, Solaris AU, Therapy, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem, don't worry if you have never heard of it, no one who isn't dead in canon dies, you shouldn't need to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-26 22:07:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5022277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphim_grace/pseuds/seraphim_grace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Upon arrival at the space station orbiting an ocean world called Eurydice a psychologist discovers that the commander of an expedition to the planet has died mysteriously. Other strange events soon start happening as well, such as the appearance of old acquaintances of the crew, including some who are dead.<br/>End notes contain spoilers and more detailed warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. These hearts were woven with human joys and cares

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keire_ke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/gifts).



> A solaris AU, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem,

Nepenthe  
A balm for sadness.

\----

_The therapist sits in his wheelchair just left of the pool of light from the window on the carpeted floor. It’s industrial beige twists that suit this bland and boring room. There is a desk with a computer, switched off, and a filing cabinet with a dejected looking pot plant. A fern._

_Steve sits in the fake leather covered desk chair facing him. There are a pair of more comfortable looking arm chairs, a low table between them with boxes of tissues open under the window. But Steve doesn’t feel ready for that kind of intimacy._

_He feels numb like he’s wrapped in cotton._

_“My name is Charles,” the therapist says, he is wearing a perfect pinstripe suit with a blue tie that matches his eyes. “I do not work or am affiliated with the Company.” He has an English accent. It reminds Steve of Peggy. He has the same calm competency. “I am not in any way obligated to report back to them, everything between us is entirely confidential.”_

_“Aren’t you supposed to tell me that unless you fear for my health or the welfare of others where you have to tell the authorities.” It’s what all the other therapists said._

_Charles nods his head acceding the point. “No,” he answered, “because I don’t believe you are a threat to yourself or others. I also believe that if you wanted to, nothing I could do would stop you.”_

_Steve can’t keep the unshuttered hurt from his face, but then he closes himself up like a fan. Charles sees it. “I’m not going to take notes.” He says, “because these sessions are about you. Not the Company.”_

_It’s been a long time since Steve has had anything for himself. The promise tastes like ashes in his mouth. So he sits silent._

\----

The shuttle docked in Eurydice station with a clanging cacophony ended with a long hiss as the umbilicus depressurised allowing travel between the transport vehicle and the Eurydice station. I checked my luggage before I made the journey down the pathway between the two. The door twisted closed behind me as I walked, eight cycles of the machinery sealing the pressure seals; the door at the other end still closed as the mechanical recorded voice of the station, Eurydice herself, told me what to do. Although this was my first time at Eurydice I knew the drill, it had been the same at Hub and Sprawl stations. In my journey I had missed the opportunity to see the planet.

What was odd was no one came out to meet me.

I knew I hadn’t been wanted but still Company personnel were all about protocol and there plenty of introduction protocols for new people on a station, especially those like me who weren’t Company.

There were four people on the station, Erskine, who had asked for me, Hammond, MacKenzie, and Lensherr. I had reports on all of them but it was Erskine I knew well. He had been my professor before I qualified. I knew Hammond and MacKenzie - call me Namor - in passing, in that I would have said hello and asked cursory how do you dos in the street but nothing more, Lensherr I knew only by reputation and the information in the packet that the Company had given me.

The entry bay and Decon booth were both unattended. I went to Decon and stripped out of the Exo suit, hanging the pieces in the receptacles so they would be stored until I needed them, and stood there in my skinsuit as the nozzles hosed me down with the decontaminant in aerosol form.

There had been no one to ensure I had, just the tinny voice of Eurydice reminding me from the speaker.

I easily could have forgone the procedure and no one would have been able to stop me. In a station like Eurydice that could be decimating.

I pulled on the clothes that the machine dispatched, tied together with a pair of station shoes, hard rubber soled canvas things that I would be encouraged to either dispose of or bring back with me when I left. With the exception of my skinsuit all of my daily wear would be provided and laundered by the station to prevent cross contamination. The same was true of my luggage. If the station could provide it - it would.

I followed Eurydice’s directions to my bunk, stowing my stuff in the lockable cabinets and noting someone had left a book on the history of Eurydistics on the bunk, tucked under the blanket where it was velcroed down. Although the station had gravity everything was built as if it might quit at any second. Blankets velcroed down, bunks were inset into the walls, cabinets locked, furniture was bolted down. This was also Company SOP.

The history of Eurydistics was not.

Eurydice was a small planetoid in the Hadean sector. Hades had been considered a waste, given the name as a joke and left to it. Surveys revealed no interesting minerals and they named the planets with things like Hel or Kore and smirked to themselves over their own cleverness. They built a relay in the shadow of Hecate and were content to go their way blithely on until Eurydice, a moon circling the planet Orphee, revealed some interesting results on a basic survey.

The results were interesting but not fascinating, not then.

One of the company scientists argued for more study and a few other surveys were done, the results went from being interesting to being fascinating, to being remarkable, to unique all in the space of four sweeps done by an interstellar drone.

These were the histories every school kid knew.

Eurydice had no minable resources but what it did have were unique results. The Company might not have been interested but the scientific community were. The Eurydice station, as it became, was the result of that.

I remembered lying in bed with Bucky, his head resting on my shoulder discussing the station, back when Erskine had first been deployed to be the resident psychologist. Eurydice had the sort of fairytale reaction like Xanadu or Shamballa, a paradise that did not exist in reality; something spoken of in stories where everyone knew someone who had been there, or was going there, or was studying its data remotely, because the station was only big enough for five full time members, an engineer, a psychologist and three professors of Eurydistics trying to solve the mystery of the moon and it’s strange readings.

Bucky had twisted his fingers through mine, his hair short and dark in the half lit room as I corrected his pronunciation, he grinned, his smile like the edge of a knife and his teeth sharp in the poor lamp light of our bed, “but your the only dee I see.” The joke was awful and I groaned at it.

From the porthole, a large window of clear aluminium alloy that looked out over the balconies and struts of the station’s construction I could see the moon, I could see it’s clouds of aether, a colloquial name, and through it I could see the brilliant crystal blue sea.

It was not water.

It was nothing so banal.

It was the sea of Eurydice that caused the anomalous readings and now nearly a hundred and fifty years after its initial discovery scientists knew as little of it as they had the day they had received those first interesting readings.

I had seen pictures, of course, in magazines and later in the data packet that the Company had given me but this was the first time I had seen the moon in person.

I didn’t know how long I stood there, hand against the metal, wondering if I should push the button that would dim the metal to solidity, removing the view, or just watch the brilliant lavender coloured planet through its lemon yellow clouds.

I had come here for Erskine. He had requested me specifically, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was Eurydice herself that wanted me, I chided myself for my ego and went on my way.

\---

_Charles’ potted fern looks like it is on the verge of death, perhaps the tales of woe it had heard in this office and decided that unable to fling itself from its perch a slow death was it’s only recourse. Steve understands how it feels._

_He is picking at the stitching of the fake leather of the arm of his desk chair. “Isn’t this where you say, how does that make you feel?”_

_“I was under the impression that you knew your own feelings, after all you’re the one who is experiencing them. I help you understand what they mean but I can’t make you feel them, or tell you what you’re supposed to feel, or if it’s right or wrong. Your feelings are valid because they are yours, but if you don’t want to talk about them I’m not going to force you.”_

_Steve is quiet for a moment, he didn’t expect that. The first Company psychologist had turned the questions back on him, as if rewording them might give him answers. Charles hasn’t done any of those things. He is a sharp faced man with a mouth like a thin red line and a bald head that reflects the light, he is always immaculately turned out in a three piece suit and never removes his jacket. There is nothing in his pockets to disturb the white lines of fabric on his navy suit. His socks, between the curve of his shoe and the straight line of his slacks are black and his shoes polished, the soles of them immaculate on the rests of his wheelchair._

_He is a well of calm in the bland beige room._

_“Will you ask me about my mother then?” Steve asks him. He wants to provoke that shining peace into rage and violence. Steve understands those, it has been so long since he knew that staid silence. A few lines of poetry from the before feel branded into his soul. “These had seen movement and heard music; known Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended”_

_“From everything that I have read your mother was a remarkable woman who raised a remarkable son against remarkable odds.” Charles answers. “Is she what you want to talk about?”_

_Steve shakes his head. He doesn't want to talk about his mother. She’s not one of the topics they avoid talking about. He just has nothing to say._

_Steve picks at the stitching of his chair. He looks at his feet. He looks at the dying potted fern. He looks at the building across from them, the one he can see from the window. It’s an office, but unlike this one is one of the open plan ones he’s seen in movies. There are no private rooms just a wide expanse of desks under fluorescent lights. Sometimes a woman in a pink shirt comes to use the photocopy machine._

_Steve doesn’t think she can see him, because she fusses with her dark hair, at one point she used the screen of her smartphone as a mirror and fixed her lipstick with the tip of her finger. It’s a succinct reminder that sometimes the more things changed the more they stayed the same._

_The world changed in an instant and yet remained exactly the same._

_“Do you want to share what you’re thinking with the rest of the class?” Charles asks. His accent is syrupy sharp and Steve hears Peggy in its cadences._

_“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” Steve answers._

_The silence comes back after that;. Aching between them. Steve wonders what the Company psychologist would say: subject is being obtuse; Subject is avoiding the topic; subject thinks using foreign languages will distract from the topic._

_“Never was a truer word spoken.” Charles smiles. “Do you want to talk about those changes? Those things which are the same?”_

_Steve meets his eyes as he answers, “no.”_

_Charles does not push._

\---

Lensherr was in the engineering suite, wearing the same stupid station shoes and scrubs, head bent over what he was soldering on the table, headphones on and I could hear the tinny reverb of his music.

He jumped when he saw me, barely avoiding using the soldering iron on his own fingers. He looked like a kid, sharp featured, something sharklike about the eyes that hadn’t really come across in the photos in the data pack, dirty blonde hair cut short and swept back. “I don’t know you,” he says, “what do you want?”.” He has clipped German consonants, long polished English vowels, hints of Poland in his cadences. He was lean and tight, looking like he might at any moment spring into violence. He looked like the kind of person who could strangle someone and only lament the state of their hair.

That was one of the ways that Bucky used to describe people.

“I don’t know you.” He had, in his startlement, knocked over a bulb of liquid, the sort used for long-haul space travel where gravity was unreliable, and for a moment I got the sharp tang of alcohol-stink and I wondered if he was drunk, if that’s why his eyes were so red.

Lensherr had been a hot-shot engineer. From the data pack I had read that he had published a lot of interesting, the Company’s word, articles on the engineering of Eurydistics. He was the one that was building the better level recording devices. He was twitching, rubbing at his nostrils and pulling at the lobe of his ears, like he was yearning or suffering an itch he just couldn’t scratch.

“Lensherr,” I said again, I resisted the urge to reach out to touch him. My head felt stuffed with cotton wool. My mouth felt rough and felted, where my knees wobbled in the artificial gravity, not sure of the floor beneath me just yet. The air was both dry and over chilled, like that first moment stepping into an industrial freezer but without the freshness of winter, occasional hisses indicated the scrubbers at work, the air scented with something to try and alleviate the staleness of it.

“I don’t know you,” he repeated, the words breaking up as he spoke. His scrubs were dirty, stained with old food and machine oil, but he was clean shaven and the promise of violence within him looked to be leashed rather than restraint. I wondered what he was drinking, was it Company issue or something he brewed himself in the parts of the station only he could reach?

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him, “are you sick?” He was clearly terrified and I didn’t know why.

“I don’t know you, why’d you come for me.” He repeated, pressing himself back against his chair to get further away from me.  
.  
“I’m here for Erskine,” I told him.

Lensherr scrubbed his hand over his hair before rubbing at his nose like a cocaine addict, “for Erskine, that makes sense, not for me, for Erskine.” He seemed to calm down a moment before he continued. “But where are you from? He didn’t mention you, I thought, I mean... I thought... he said…” his words were falling apart as the sentences continued, grammar losing it’s way as he spoke into a jumble of confused words, their syntax working solely by juxtaposition and gesture.

“Earth,” I told him as if it was a ridiculous question.

“Earth?” he repeated, “stupid question, stupid question, Erik, you know better.”

“I came in on the Prometheus.” I qualified for him.

That seemed to shake him from his confusion. “On the Prometheus, on the ship, not just from Earth, on the ship.”

“Yes,” I said, clearly this man needed a psychologist, I understood now why Erskine had sent for me. It was not unusual for long term scientists of secluded stations to lose their grasp on reality, they called it Space Sickness but back in the old days they called it Cabin Fever. It was not an easy fix, as if they had been isolated enough for it to kick in, you couldn’t just rehabilitate them. This was not my area of study, I thought to myself. I worked primarily with bored housewives and middle class worker drones. But Erskine had asked for me.

“I just got in, on the ship.” I modulated my voice to be as calming as it could be without being patronising. I repeated myself, like he had done, but without the mania. “On the Prometheus, from Earth. For Erskine.” This seemed to ease him and I could see the panic bleed from his face. “I’m Rogers.”

“Rogers,” he transformed then, using his hands which had been twitching like an addict’s to smooth back his blonde hair on a deep breath, “you came in on the Prometheus.”

“There was a message sent, a month or so again, telling you I was coming. And another this morning.” I kept maintaining his cadences, the way he spoke so as not to alarm him. His entire body shifted as the relief crashed through him. I could see now that the skin of his knuckles was cracked and broken, one of his nails was black where it had snapped off. None of those things were unusual for an engineer. The one time I had fixed the kitchen faucet I had stripped the skin from two knuckles and Bucky had laughed as he smeared antiseptic on them, the salve hurting far more than the original injury. I had jerked my hand away from him before he pressed his lips the side of my hand at the base of my finger and told me he had kissed it better.

“The doctor,” he said, happy now he understood it. “From Earth, for Erskine,” he let out an explosive breath of relief. “Sorry, Doc, it’s just been,” he spread his hands.

“Where is everyone?” I asked him. “Where’s Erskine?”

“He’s gone,” Lensherr said, “gone," he wiped under his nose with the flat of his hand as he spoke. “Hammond and Mackenzie are, Mackenzie's in the lab, Hammond won't leave his room, he’s locked the door and won't come out, I knock and knock but he doesn't answer.”

“Where has Erskine gone? He knew I was coming." I found it was best to treat him like a lunatic and talk to him like that. Nevertheless, he was my only source of information.

“This morning, at dawn." I was getting the impression that I wasn't going to get anything from Lensherr and I would be better wandering the station.

“Is he on a survey ship? He didn't ask the Prometheus to take him back." I asked. I knew the answers to most of those questions, if he had commed the Prometheus I wouldn't be on board the Eurydice station at all.

"No, no,” Lensherr seemed frantic again. “He was gone." In his gesturing, he drew his finger across his throat. “You’ll understand, I can't explain it, but you’ll understand, go home, lock the doors, you’ll understand. You’ll understand.”

I got the impression I would not understand, something had happened here on the station. I remembered Hammond as a bright personality, the sort that talked constantly, he burned brightly, Mackenzie was quieter, more introspective but no less brilliant. Only the best were selected for the company. “It’s okay, son, it's been a surprise and I’m tired from the journey. I’ve taken one of the bunks, is there anything I should know." Some stations had localised thermostats for each cabin, I didn't know if this station did, or if the showers had kinks like they would on Earth or if the sun rose bright enough that I would need to tint the windows overlooking the lavender sea. With the sun, Hades, setting, the clouds were a dusty colour with hints of umber and terracotta. It was beautiful. I could see it through the slats over the window of his work room. The air stunk of burned flux spilled alcohol and stale recycled air.

"Lock the door." Lensherr said grabbing my shoulder. His hands were like stone claws and hurt against the flesh underneath it. “When you get there, lock the door, don’t open it, no matter what you hear. Promise me, promise me you’ll lock the door." I reassured him that I would because his mania was clearly returning. “It’s changed, it's not safe, how long will she wait? How long?” I explained that the Prometheus hoped to remain docked for another 70 hours, giving them time to remove waste and resupply. It also allowed the station’s findings to be moved in hardcopy for the company. “I," he said, “they wouldn't let us leave, not now, they’d never let us go. Lock your door, you’ll see and then you’ll understand, you’ll send the Prometheus away, we don’t deserve to go home, not now, not after what we've done.” I made the decision not to push as his mania worsened, I left him to his strong booze and solder fumes.

—-

  
_“Do you want to talk about him?” Charles asks_

_“You don't take notes." Steve ducks the question as he has every time it has been brought up. He’s not ready to talk yet, he's not sure he ever will be._

_“No, because this is about you, not the Company, do you trust them not to find anything written down, because I don't.” He’s so calm when he speaks, his hands sit still in his lap._

_“Can I ask about the chair?” Steve is not ready to talk and so he avoids the subject, he knows Charles will bring it up again later but he seems more amenable to letting him right now. “Was it an accident?”_

_“Friendly fire." Charles answers._

_“Aint no such thing. It still does the damage." Steve understands it. He doesn't think he should, hale and hearty as he is, but he does. He had not thought that Charles was a soldier. He was wrong._

_“I lost feeling in the left leg entire, the right from the knee down. A ricochet from an ally’s gun went the wrong way clipped me, didn’t look serious but delays getting to the hospital, mistakes made when it first happened, sand in the wound tract from the initial impact with the ground, it was a long time ago, they didn't really know what they were doing,” There is a hint of bitterness in his voice but Steve doesn't think that it’ about the chair or the injury, but something else, perhaps the guilt of the ally who caught him with that ricochet._

_“Wouldn't the Company..." Steve leaves it open for him to answer._

_“I wouldn't want to feel obligated." Charles answers, “you know what they’re like when you owe them.”_

_“True enough.” Steve says, and knows it for truth. The Company never forgets, especially what it’s owed._

——

There was a child. I hadn't expected that. She sat on the floor of the corridor, but she wasn't playing, there was no toys to amuse her, or games. She wore a torn white smock, with a frill around her neck, and a large tear at her side revealing the thin dirty skin of her ribs. She was wearing a pair of thick black stockings, only one of which had a foot, the other was grey with dirt. Her face was made up, dark black shadow around her eyes and dark smeared rouge on her lips, but I wouldn't have thought her any more than eleven or twelve. Her hair had been style but mostly fallen out of it's dusty curls around her shoulders. When she saw me she stood up, smoothing her white cotton shift over her absent breasts and cocking her hips to thrust out her ass, most of which was visible under the shift. Her nails were painted black but bitten and there was a large costume jewellery ring on the third finger of her left hand.  
She laughed and then strutted off, aware of her concupiscence and power, the door hissing shut behind her.

I was running explanations in my head of what it might be, because the idea that there was a French child prostitute from the belle epoque on the station struck me as being a touch ludicrous, and I didn't know what else she could be. I remembered that Erskine had been fascinated with photography of that period, especially those photos of prostitutes who had always looked so jaded and tired. I didn't know if it was a sexual fascination or a psychologist's disassociation from the overt suffering that these women went through in their erotic poses for those strict Victorian gentlemen that bought both their bodies and their pictures. Erskine had said that some cultures had believed that photos would capture their souls, with photos like those he collected - cherished in leather bound albums - I believed it.

The photos had always made me uncomfortable.

But my own thoughts more often prepared the hard planes of a man’s back to the soft curves of a woman’s hip and breast.

There were many solutions to the manifestation, I decided. Anoxia caused by the stale air, pressure changes altering the way my brain processed information, even the fumes from Lensherr’s solder and alcohol. There were lots of reasons I could be seeing a child prostitute on a space station thousands of giga-k’s from Earth hundreds of years after her time. Anoxia seemed the most likely. Often bad air was enough to work on as long as no one interacted with the hallucinations, or it might just have been the shift from ship air to station air. It wasn't anything to worry about, just something thrown out by my subconscious.

I'd had weirder hallucinations before.

There had been the summer in Taranto, with the sun on the water and prosecco pouring like water. The harsh light on the white walls of the Aragon castle and Bucky’s kisses almost as sweet as the limoncello that we sipped between meals. Bucky’s eyes were the same grey as the morning sea. We ate like kings of pastries, pasta and gelato, and then one night, sex stupid and naked under the hot Italian night we slipped tabs of hallucinogens under our tongues as we kissed, our hands hard and wet against each other, and we rutted together.

The drugs reacted badly with Bucky, and dealing with someone else's bad trip when your own was still in full flow just tipped me into one, and I saw the walls made of screaming decomposing babies. It wasn't my last trip, but it was one that lingered.

Bucky never told me what he saw.

So yeah, underage turn of the twentieth-century prostitutes - they didn’t rate.

 

The cabin I had chosen was small, as all the “guest" accommodations were. They were potential storage rooms that were there "in case" with an inset bunk that could be switched out for cupboards. There was a small adjoining head with sonic shower and another of those slatted viewscreens over Eurydice.

Eurydice was unique because it had an ocean, a singular capacity of something that was not water but maintained the illusion of liquidity. All of the bizarre readings from Eurydice came from it's ocean. It was a shifting lavender coloured mass that flowed under clouds that were the colour of limoncello and as fragile as broken glass. I don't know how long I stood there staring at it before I stripped down to my skinsuit and into the sonics. They weren't as good as a real shower, and the booth was far too small for two people had there been two here, but they got you clean. I didn't know why I was so nostalgic, just did my best to shove the feeling back into the box where I kept them. Bucky was gone, long gone, Earth gone, and I was half a universe away on a space station floating in an amethyst sky.

I climbed into the bed, strapped the velcro in place, wearing only my skinsuit and my memories and tried to sleep. It was a long time coming but eventually I drifted, dreaming of lying on beds of soft unspun cotton as I floated on a shell pink sea, my fingers and toes dipping in the water, warm and salty like the seas of Taranto, and there was Bucky, hair fuck-swept and skin salt rimed from swimming, wearing only his trunks and a smile, his teeth as white as the walls of the castle and stupidly happy and in love, and in my sleep I smiled.

 

When I woke up Bucky was sat on the cabin’s lone chair staring at the bed.

It was a surprise but I managed to prevent myself scuttling up the bed away from him. He looked wide open, and pale as he had not been in a long time, like he had been crying. His blue eyes were red rimmed and his lips were swollen from where he had bitten them. He wore a heavily patterned black vest and long suit jacket, with a crinkled silk scarf tied around his neck. It was what he had been wearing when I found him. He finished the look off with a pair of bright red chucks, the laces were brilliant white but now I looked, I really looked, seeing past my surprise and horror and general sense of what the fuck, there were things wrong. Although the buttons on his jacket were there there was no buttonholes to match. The flaps over his pockets were sewn down. There was no place for the vest to be undone, almost as if it was tugged down over his head. The same was true of his chucks, like the laces were decorative.  
I had had a moment where I had thought that I was still dreaming, and I had been glad, then I knew it was not true. I was not dreaming.

He looked exactly as he had the last time that I had seen him alive. He had turned twenty-eight years old that spring. He would have been thirty-nine sitting on the Eurydice, but the dead stayed young forever.

He looked exactly the same, down to the creases of fabric on his sleeves. My grandfather's ring was a silver lump on his thumb. Just as he had when I had found him dead years before.

The sun was a blazing red ball in the sky, tinting the lemon yellow clouds a ruddy orange. The red light was filtering through the slatted windows, pooling across the floor like a bloodstain. It was touching the legs of Bucky’s chair.

“What do you want?” I asked, I swung my legs from the bed and my bare feet were on the cold steel floor. It was one of the ways that these things felt real, but they couldn't be real, because Bucky died ten years before. A lifetime of sadness that lay in wait for him, until here was nothing left. Until a postponed conversation was never picked up. “How did you get here, Buck?”

He reached across and took my hand, pressing the tips of his fingers against my own, just like he used to. He would tap my grandfather's ring against the side of his cup. I catalogued his tics long ago. It was heartbreaking to see them now. "I don't know," he said, “is that bad?” He had a low absent minded tone, in my memory it was always tinged with sadness.

“Has anyone else seen you?” I asked him, “did you meet anyone on your way here?”

"I don't know," he said, “I came here, does it matter, Stevie." Only he had ever called me Stevie. He was still playing with my hand but his face looked dark and shuttered. His lips were dark as when he had eaten sour cherries, the juice staining the skin dark, and it had looked like blood between his teeth.

“Bucky?” I asked him.

“What is it, love?” the word had always fallen so easily off his tongue, like if he didn't say it he might simply explode from holding it back. It had been one of the things I loved about him but also one of the things I had missed so fiercely.

“How did you find me?”

When he smiled he never showed his teeth. It was another of his tics. "I've no idea, isn't that funny, you were asleep so I didn’t want to wake you, you get grumpy and whiny when I wake you," he was circling his fingertips against mine in a complicated game, “I know blowing you is always an option when you’re like that, but the last time I tried to wake you by blowing you you jumped so high I nearly choked and fell off the bed, and banged my head. I got two stitches.” He touched his fingers to the scar on his brow. He had always worn it like a badge of pride, a private joke between us. At the emergency room he had said he had stood on a slipper that gave way under him and he lost his balance, cutting himself on the corner of the nightstand. We had giggled like children and the doctor clearly knew it was a sex thing but said nothing.

“Were you down below?” I asked him.

"It was cold," he answered, and got up from his chair to sit next to me on the bed, twining his fingers through mine. He laid his head against my shoulder and I could smell him, the warmth of him and his softnesses and all the reasons I loved him, had fallen in love with him, stayed in love with him. Mourned him, grieved him, missed him, and now he sat on a bunk in a space station light years from Earth and held my hand with his left. I tugged up the cuff of his jacket, there did not appear to be a shirt underneath, another hint of the wrongness that pervaded him, a hallucination I wondered, like the girl in the hallway. The slashes on the inside of his wrist were stark raised red and open, five of them, obscenely forming a star, the skin in the heart of it puckered and torn where the skin was still open. There was no blood, no healing tissue or visceral clumps of congealed fibrous matter. The skin was just open like crags or ravines in the desert.

I felt the bile rise in the back of my throat as it had then.

For long years I had dreamt of those marks, when I first found him, the red blushed through the white bedding from his left wrist. He had sat on the bed and with the kitchen knife carved open his own arms and just lay down, lacking even the courtesy of sitting in the bath like the victims of the hospital tried. The warm water kept the blood flowing. I don't think he knew that so every time the blood slowed, clotting over the slash as much as it could he carved another. He had only carved into his left wrist so the right would be able to hold the knife, and I would wake up, twisted into the same position he had had when I had found him, cold on the bed, as if by virtue of finding that exact spot on the new mattress, on the new bedding, where he had lain there and died alone he would forgive me.

I had carried his note around in my wallet, folding and unfolding it until the creases needed to be strengthened with tape, pulling it out to stare at it, at the five words which he had left me with.

I tried to convince myself he hadn't meant to do it, that it had been a way to scare me, to clamour for my attention, dragging me away from my patients, as others, my colleagues, Erskine among them, told me it was a sudden depression, but it wasn't true. I knew that first day I saw him, riding the tram and holding of all things a door knob, that I would love him eternally and that I would lose him. He was that kind of love.

I had even wondered, with a sick and obscene fascination, when I drank too much or took too much if I loved him as fiercely as I had because I had known that I would lose him.

How ironic, I thought to myself, that the station was called Eurydice and here I was, at best dreaming at worst haunted, like Orpheus.

Orpheus had sacrificed everything to go into the underworld, even his own chance for death. He had played his lyre to soothe the three headed dog, to win the help of the ferryman and brought a tear to the eye of Dread Kore who had offered him a chance. I felt like Orpheus in that passage back to the living world, but I had turned back. God damn me, I had turned back.

I couldn't do this, I wanted to scream, to claw at my face, but I couldn't let go of his hand.

I wouldn't let go of his hand.

I had mourned him, and grieved him and thrown things across the apartment as I hated him as much as I loved him, and he was here, and his skin was as soft as a newborns and his clothes were wrong and he smelled like he had been eating oranges of all things, tart and sweet and citrus and it wasn't a dream. Dreams weren't this cruel. “Buck, this can’t,”

he reached over and pressed the tip of his right index finger to my mouth, “don’t," he said. His eyelids were tightly shut, and his lashes black against his cheek.

“Where are we, buck?” I asked him.

“We’re at home." He said.

“which is where?” I had to press this, I had to know.

“Steve,” He said and tilted his face up for a kiss, “I feel good.” I knew what he wanted, and I couldn’t. I just didn't have it in me anymore. I had loved him and hated him and mourned him and missed him and loathed him for too long. This wasn't a dream, it was a terrible thing, but it wasn't a dream. I didn't know what it was, just that it was not a dream.

“Where are your things?” I asked.

“My things?" It was as if he did not know what I was asking him.

Was this what had rattled Lensherr so bad? I wondered. Was this why Hammond and Mackenzie wouldn't leave their rooms, why Erskine had gone wherever it was he had gone. I felt like I was flying to pieces and I could not glue the parts into a cohesive whole. How could I? Bucky was here and he was dead and I missed him so much but this was not him, just something that looked like him and knew what he knew because it could not be him. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.

“You mean you only have those clothes?" IF he was real he would be wearing a skinsuit and scrubs. He would be wearing the ugly comfortable tennis shoes, not his bright red, blood red, chucks. He might have pulled a station jacket, emblazoned with the Company logo, over his shirt, but he would not be dressed like that.

My words caught him unawares and for the first time he looked around, he appraised the gray gunmetal walls and the fixed furniture and he was surprised. “Maybe in the locker," he said finally.

“There's nothing in there but a pair of old overalls, the sort you wear under EVA," I told him. I had checked the lockers the night before, locking them again when I was done. Storage on a station like this was premium. There was always something squirreled away in the lockers.

In the head there was an electric razor leashed to the wall by it's cord, and careful to keep him in sight I went to it and began to use it, shaving away the night’s scruff. I did not know who was with me in the room but I had no intention of antagonising them in case they became dangerous. “Steve,” he said, “It's like I've forgotten something, like there’s a gap.” He stopped, screwing up his face. It was not one of the tics in him I had loved, he was rarely lost. “Was I sick?” he asked me.

It was as good an explanation as any I decided. “Yes, for a while you were a bit sick.”

“That must be it," he said, "I don't remember because I was sick.” He seemed like a simplified version of Bucky, one that had been stripped of most of his emotional complexity, reduced to a few overblown gestures and programmed with his memories but none of the emotions that accompanied them.

“Are you hungry?” I asked. I knew he would demur food but I half expected him to tell me that he had been eating oranges. "I’m hungry, I’m going to go to the mess to see what there is to eat.”

“Should I wait here for you?" he asked. “Will you be long?” he looked almost frantic, like a child asked to wait for a beloved parent in a strange place. I told him I shouldn't be longer than an hour, but he declared that he would accompany me. This was new, Bucky had been fiercely independent and valued his alone time, the promise of an hour alone to himself would have been something he would pounce on. If he was still feeling amorous it would have given him time to plan a seduction. I had expected him to wait.

“You should wait, I have to get some things done.”

“No," his voice was like a thunderclap, the red light from the sun was staining his skin now. "I’ll go with you.”

I tried t keep my voice level, calm. I did not want to upset this person, I did not know what they were capable of. “why?” I asked.

"I don't know.” Again he resembled nothing more than a child, "I can’t.” He qualified. For a second I contemplated reaching out and grabbing the silk scarf he had loosely tied around his neck and pulling, tugging it as tight as I could to silence him once and for all, this thing which appeared before me wearing Bucky’s face. This crude facsimile, but then I remembered Lensherr's bloody hands and did nothing.

I had another plan.

Halfway to the comms station were some of the tech boats, fitted with equipment they were sent out over Eurydice’s ocean before being snared back in by the operator. In the case of an emergency they could be used for basic life support. Six months of air and nutripaste was fitted into the capsule. It was used primarily for shuttling cargo between the station and the satelloid which connected it to the Company, and back again. I encouraged Bucky to lie in it, lying as I kissed his forehead, the way I had ten years before. I told him I would follow and we could both move to the Prometheus and then home. That I needed to go second to close the hatch. Then I closed the hatch and fired him into the void.

I figured it would buy me a few hours before the others reeled it in, time to think and confront Lensherr because I did understand now, but across the comms, I could hear him shouting my name before I flicked the switch on the panel and silenced him.


	2. Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance

_The room seems to get smaller the longer Steve sits in it. Sometimes he needs to get up and walk, and Charles lets him, sure he’ll come back. Once he comes back with hot drinks, chocolate for himself and tea for Charles in a travel mug that Charles pours into a china cup, saying it affects the taste. Charles prefers earl grey, and often brings a thermos of hot water and a box of tea-bags. Steve doesn’t think coffee tastes right any more. It's lost the burnt bitterness he's used to, it seems thicker, sweetened with frothed milk he doesn't care for. So he drinks hot chocolate, sweet and thick on his tongue, even though he doesn't really like it._

_He's starting to consider the tea. “Do you know the story of Eurydice?" Charles asks, holding his cup in front of him. Earl Grey, black, perfumed and pungent, but untouched by sugar or lemon._

_“Yes," Steve says. He puts his cup down. His stomach for it gone._

_"It’s an interesting story, you see Orpheus is the son of Apollo and Calliope, a god and a muse. He is talented and beautiful, beloved amongst the gods. And he meets Eurydice, a human girl and he falls in love, and she loves him back, and they are wed. On the night of their wedding, as she dances, she stands on a venomous snake and is bitten, she dies.”_

_“And he goes into the underworld to get her back and fails. I know the story, doc." Steve cuts him off._

_“Not quite, first he goes to Thanatos, and begs her to bring Eurydice back, and she tells him that she cannot, but if he goes into the underworld after her then he will lose her benison, he will become Deathless as no man or might go to the underworld twice., he decides it is worth it because he is young and in love. But being young and in love he can't wait until they are both in the light before he turns back, and he curses himself to live eternally without her. Determined to destroy himself he goes to the Maenads who tear him apart and the muses keep him, a deathless head, that sings to them.”_

_“Why tell me this story?” Steve's hands have formed fists in his lap without him even noticing._

_“Don’t you know?" Charles is calm, a wide peace in the horrible bland room with it's uncomfortable chairs, dying fern and the lingering stink of earl grey. Steve does know. That’s the problem._

—-

Lensherr was in the mess, he was wearing the same scrubs with the reagent burns that he had been wearing the day before. His hands were darkened with something and he fussed with his shirt, like he was used to doing something with his hands that he couldn’t. I wondered if he had been a smoker. “How about a chat?" he said pushing across a juice bulb to me. I didn't know if he had added his liquor but I hoped he had. I needed a drink, and even reconstituted orange juice would suffice.

Although I had slept I felt wrung out. I supposed facing the recreation of your lover who had killed themselves ten years before and tricking them into a tech boat so you had time to think took a lot out of you.

I didn't answer him, just unscrewed the top and drained the bulb.

“You had guests didn't you?” he said, he was leaning into my space, his breath was rank with sour wine and old coffee. He had a sort of bodily stink, tainted sweat and reagent stains. His skin was gray and his eyes red rimmed. He had a smile like a shark, too many teeth crammed into place in his mouth . He was handsome, chiseled, too harsh for my tastes, but then he smiled and it was clear he was a predator of sorts. Frantic he had struck me with the danger of his mania, calm he disturbed me.

“Yes," I said drily. I wanted to look for more juice bulbs but he had me caged in in the mess. I wasn't hungry but the promise of liquor was motivating me.

“Get rid of them?" He seemed delighted, like a child on Christmas morning, “what did you do, stave their head in with a crank? Poison? Strangling?”

“What’s your point?” I asked. I wasn't interested in his fascination.

“Its how you did it, there’s no blood, you didn't even damage the wash basin so you didn't smash their head open on them. You just opened the rocket, helped him in and locked the door, that’s cold. I can admire that.” He shrugged sitting back in his chair. He was a long lean man, and struck me as being a creature of constrained violence. “It gives us two, three hours." He had a disagreeable smile, I had preferred him when he was manic. “You think I’m an ass for not telling you.” I didn't disagree. “Would you have believed me?” I said nothing.

“Erskine was the first one it happened to.” He continued, his smile looked like a threat. “Locked himself up in his lab, trying to understand it he said, we thought he’d gone," he made a spiral motion with his finger at his temple, “but he wasn't hurting no one and the Prometheus was a week out. He asked for time, just left alone whilst he tried. He must’ve asked for you then. He begged we give him a chance before sedating him and waiting.”

“A chance?”

Lensherr shrugged, “You knew him better than I did, maybe you can make sense of his work, we’ve still got it. At that point we didn't know anything, we thought he was hallucinating, it happened before, one of the scientists went a bit," he made the gesture again, “Morita, that was his name, managed to scoop up a bit of the ocean, claimed he was gonna be god and drank it. Killed him, yanno, I mean what did you expect, but yeah, it adds up, the ocean, the light is the wrong colour and sometimes it burns you, like we all have sunburn in places, hands mostly, there’s a lotion, and we use it all the time, but there’s the sounds, and the enclosure and the smells, we can't help it, we all start to stink no matter how many times we shower. We're stuck here, it catches up with you. We usually cycle out before we go completely cuckoo but you never know, yanno. It happens.”

It did happen. When I had been training I had worked with a pilot who had gone space sick. Enclosed spaces terrified him, open spaces disturbed him. He spent most of his days sedated to protect both him and those around him.

Space sickness affected everyone differently. Some people wanted enclosure. Some wanted open spaces. Some thought they were hamsters. I remembered a case book from when I was a student about one that believed his ship was infested by space herpes. He had created a small rodent like creature in his hallucinations that chewed through wires and would cause them to crash, and it bit, apparently. He had actually created illustrations of the thing, this rat faced bald creature with white translucent skin and black claws. There had even been a scare that he had not been Space Sick and that aliens had taken over the ship, like the gremlins of world war 2.

“How long did it go on?” I asked.

“The visit, a week or so, I mean we don't know for certain, we had to guess from when he locked himself in his room. We thought it was a hallucination, I mean no one else saw it, it would have been space weevils all over, so I gave him something.”

“Scopolamine?” I asked.

"I thought he wanted to self-medicate, but he used it on the visitor.”

“What about you?”

“On the third day we decided to press, we over rode the door controls, and went in, I mean noble intentions and all, we could sedate him until the next cargo sweep.

“And there was his hallucination.” It wasn't a question. I could see how it went.

“Yeah, but by that point, we'd had visitors too. We couldn't pander to him anymore, we had our own problems. Well, now it’s kinda routine.” That word had a terrible prominence the way he said it, the terror welled up in me that what I had gone through might become ... routine.

“Didn't you hear voices?”

“Of course, we did, but never together, and you're the head doctor, you should know crazy’s catching. If it was a contaminant or bad air we’d all be infected.”

“So you didn't see anyone?”

"I did." He looked angry as he spoke.

“The little girl with the dark hair.” I knew, I had seen her too. “You might have warned me.” I was tired, my conviction was long gone now.

“How?" he asked, “you have to understand, I didn't know who would appear, maybe the girl would go away now Erskine did, I mean he hung himself, surely she should fuck off without him to torment but she didn’t. We can't tell you because we don't know.”

"I have questions," it was all I really had.

“Are you asking if it’ll come back?”

"I suppose I am."

“Yes, and no,"

“Doesn't it warrant a straight answer?” I was too tired to be angry.

“I don't have a straight answer to give." He admitted, he leaned forward on the table, his back was arched and he looked like someone had hung a millstone around his neck. I fixed my gaze on his skinned knuckles. “He’ll be back, just like at first. He won't know, no, he’ll pretend that nothing happened, that you didn't kill him. He won't be aggressive unless you make him, but he won't always react the way you think.”

"Lensherr!”

“what?”

“We can't afford to keep secrets.”

"It’s not a secret, Rogers," he snarled at me, turning to look at me over his shoulder. “You don't get it." He was furious now. “Who was it? who visited you?”

I swallowed and looked away. I couldn't bear to look at him. I wished for anyone but him. “ A man that I..." the words fell away, but I pressed on. “He killed himself. He made a... he slashed his wrists.”

He waited, and then asked, “suicide?” I nodded, “anything else," I remained silent, “that’s never it, it's never that simple.”

“What makes you say that?” He didn’t answer. I let the silence stretch between us until I couldn't bear it any more. “All right,” I licked my lips and then pressed them together, “we had a fight, well, not exactly, I was an ass, and I let him slip away and I said things because I was angry, and I packed my things and left. I knew him, but I didn't think he would, I just wanted time, but when I came back the next day it was too late, he was already dead.”

“Oh, you poor innocent boy." I didn't know if he was being ironic or not.

I lashed out, but I couldn't tell if he was mocking me. He looked like a new person me, he was ashen, worn so deep his skin was like parchment stretched thin over bone. He looked like he was gravely ill. “Why do you say that?" I asked. I was humbled now.

“Because it's a sad story," he added, “no," as I stirred, “you don't get it, you can experience that the way you do, you can even blame yourself, consider yourself a murderer, but it's not the worst of it.”

“Really?” I asked him.

“The worst thing is what didn't happen.”

"I don't follow." I could be honest in that.

“A normal person," he begun, “what makes us normal, someone who's never done anything bad, or terrible, but I bet he’s considered it, a fleeting idea that skitters over his brain pan before he shuts it down, going I would never, and he was right, he wouldn't, because people don’t, but the idea was there. Now think of it, there suddenly in broad daylight," he spread is hands “he meets IT that horrible idea chained to him, following him around like a puppy, what then, what happens next?”

I had no answers so I remained silent.

“Welcome to Eurydice," his tone was sharp and cruel, “where a passing fancy of a long dead pre-teenage whore is made real, and she’s there, urging you on although you know you never would, there it is, the possibility, the very worst of you made flesh and urging. That's what we have here, the worst of us, that skittering dark thought, the shadow of what we are, suppressed, ignored, allowed to starve within us, given flesh and hungers. He appears as he did the day he died, doesn't he? Still vital and beautiful and all the things he was but there, at the moment of death, that moment where for a single second you were glad that he was dead.”

“But what does the station have to do with it?" I felt stupefied by the revelation and could not thin.

“This is what I’m talking about, this is what the station does, we come out here prepared for silence, to give us time to think and work, and cycle out after a year or two, after all no one has found anything, it gives us time to work on all our projects. We can publish when we get back, we have labs and no oversight from the Company, we are magnificent bastards to a man, and we're not trying to conquer, just to expand, to understand. Oh there’s the Company, god alone knows what it wants, but we just wanna know. We don't intend to subjugate other species, we just want to share what makes us magnificent. We prize our first contact so others can see how magnificent we are, we're expecting people, others that can understand just what magnificent bastards we are. We want species that can tell us we’re better than they are, because that's what we are, egos with legs.”

He started to pick at his thumbnail with his teeth. “But we refuse to accept that something else exists, so when it happens we cant come to terms with it because it's not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.”

“Then what is it?" I asked, having listened patiently to his rambling.

“We got what we wanted, contact with another civilization. We have it, First Contact. Our own monstrous ugliness, our own shame held up and magnified for us to see as if under a microscope.”

“It's the ocean?" I asked, “What for, never mind the how, for the love of god, do you think it’s trying to play with us, punish us, that would be one hell of a primitive society, perhaps a culture of demons. A planet ruled by Lucifer himself manifested as a great big sea and it amuses itself by sending succubi to tempt us into sin. This is a scientific expedition, surely you can't believe this bullshit.”

“The devil is far from stupid." He muttered, “and I doubt we had to come halfway across the galaxy to find him.” I began to suspect a psychotic break. If there was scopolamine I could use it to tranquilise him.

"I’m not crazy." He said. “You’ve only scratched the surface, the Prometheus leaves in 60 hours, if after 5o you don't think I’m right, I’ll go back, I’ll let you call me crazy. But the devil was kind, is this where you tell me what he wants?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Lensherr put his head on the table, and I knew then that that part of our conversation was over. The metaphysics could wait.

“What changed?”

“The experiment," he answered, “it started maybe a week, maybe ten days after the experiment, we bombarded a small part of the ocean with rads, maybe the ocean decided to revenge itself on us, to release these hallucinations. I mean, how do I know I’m the same Erik that came here two years ago, I was cycling ready to leave but I can't, not now. Not with what is going on.” He started laughing softly, as if my utter bewilderment was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

Then he stopped as abruptly as if he had been switched off. “No, there's lots of differences I’m sure, but I’m a scientist, I have to know what I can prove, there’s only one difference, you have to remember this, promise me, Rogers, remember this, they're different - you and I can be killed.”

“And they can't?” I asked.

“I'd advise you not try. It's terrible to behold.”

"Not with anything?”

"Nothing I've tried. Not poison, knife, rope....”

“Isn't there an atomic dismantler on the station?” I had read about that in my briefing.

“Do you want to be the one to try?”

I didn't have an answer. “They’re human, aren't they? Are they not?”

“In a sense, I suppose, subjectively. They just don't know, you must have noticed that?” I had and said so, “They regenerate, right before your eyes, and then they start all over again, like," he was silent, gnawing on his thumbnail for a few long moments, “then they go back, like a factory reset, to exactly how we remembered them.”

“Did Erskine know?” I wanted to change the subject. Erskine had been my friend, my mentor. “Did he know what we know?”

Lensherr nodded. "It’s how we can tell, look," he splayed his fingers to show the bloodied knuckles, there was blood in the cracks of skin on his fingers, amidst the blonde hair, “I’m not regenerating.”

“What about Hammond? Mackenzie?”

“What about them, Hammond got himself killed when we broke into his room, and Mckenzie’s in his room. It stops being about acting and starts being about coping, about just getting through until the Company lets you leave and you have a rubber room with your name on it waiting on Earth, three squares a day and all the haldol you can take until your veins collapse.” He shrugged, “just the more we gave up, and we did, Mackenzie was the only one who kept fresh scrubs, he shaved, it's whatever gets you through. He’s in the lab, I suppose, doing whatever it is he needs to do until the Company clears him for re-entry, for all I know he's cooking Haldol or his own form of morphine and just medicating, no one gets into the lab, and when we do see him, he's oiled his hair back and clean shaven. He could be a visitor for all I know. I haven't spoken to him for nearly two weeks.”

“He's going to come back again? Isn't he?”

"Mackenzie, yeah, when the sun starts to set he starts to get hungry, you’ll see him then, but if you mean your boy, he’ll be back. God alone knows how they get in, the station is hermetically sealed, the plating's sound, just there where they weren't before. Most often when you sleep, and everyone has to sleep.”

“What about locking them away?”

“They get out, they always get out.”

“You want me to shut down the station, don’t you, you think if it comes from me they won't decide it’s space sickness, right, I haven't been here long enough to be anything other than tired. So we get the Prometheus to take us back, to what, that rubber room you mentioned, then the company would pressure us to change our stories, to come up with a solution and a new batch of scientists would come out here and it would start all over again whilst we sit in manicured gardens and take nice quiet walks with the orderlies.” His face said it all, the clouds that I could see outside the slatted windows were lilac-tinged, stained red by the sun and the sea. Strangely despite the colours, the landscape was monotonously bland. The sea had taken on a blood black colour like the clots on Bucky's wrists.

“Give it time," Lensherr said, standing up, “you’ll get there. Soon that rubber room will sound like paradise, if only because you won't get any visitors, and then they’re someone else’s problem.”

—-

Erskine had left me a tape recorder. I found it when I returned to my bunk. I climbed into the bed, still dressed, just minus my tennis shoes and dimmed the lights. I felt it against my hip, I had probably moved it when I had slept, I wondered for a whole moment if it would be as succinct as Bucky’s note, the one I still carried with me. Then I stowed it away and lay there in the dark, processing, letting my brain cycle through what Lensherr had told me. Hammond was dead in an accident relating to the experiment as I understood it. Erskine had hung himself. Bucky was going to come back, probably whilst I slept. There was no where for me now but denial or a medicated future in a sanatarium. Then there was the Company, they’d want to exploit this, people who could regenerate could become soldiers, could be explorers. The Company would want in on this. They’d find a way to spin a profit. So what if it drove the humans mad, humans were the cheapest resource there was, easily mass produced by cheap unskilled labour- that was the joke wasn't it. Yeah, the Company would use this. It was just what the Company was.

I lay there long enough, swaddled in the blanket, that I fell asleep. Perhaps it was deliberate. O missed him, I loved him, perhaps I slept knowing it would make him come back to me, but I would have denied it.

—-

_“What do you know about relativity?" Charles’ question is so out of left field it surprises Steve. “Specifically about the concept of time relative to other systems?”_

“ _Why should I know anything about it?” he’s not sure if he should be angry. Sometimes Charles is more teacher than a healer. It leaves Steve feeling raw and angry and confused and reassured - often all at the same time._

_“I could bore you with physics but I think it's easier to explain what I mean by it, Einstein would turn in his grave, but by this relativity means time reacts differently in different situations.”_

_“Like time flies when you’re having fun?” Steve can't keep the derision from his voice._

_"Precisely, but also how time seems to slow when you’re waiting for something, or how a watched pot never boils when it takes the same amount of time it takes when you're doing something else. How a lifetime zips past with a lover in a moment, but a moment without them can feel like a lifetime.”_

_“Fancy science terms for something simple.”_

_“Sometimes using names give us something to hold on to." Charles offers the solution. “A shorthand if you will. Have you ever considered relativity in this context.”_

_“It’s been a lifetime." Steve offers, “even without speeding up the clock.”_

_“For us, maybe," Charles interlinks his fingers, “but not for you. For you, it's been barely any time at all. That's relativity, for you, it's been measured in days. That’s okay, you’re acting like it should be measured in decades and maybe it should, but not for you, for you it's been days and that’s okay, it's okay to grieve, to mourn, no matter how long it seems to take, the only person whose opinion of this that should matter is yours.”_

_“And if I’m not ready, if it takes a hundred years?" Steve wants to needle him, to poke, to tear down Charles’ equanimity and replace it with his own hollowness and rage._

_“Then it takes a hundred years," Charles answers calmly. “It takes as long as it takes, that's relativity, the passing of time is different for all of us, these sessions with you probably seem interminable to you, but to me, they just fly by.”_

 

—

 

I let his breath wash over my neck before I turned, slipped my fingers under his dimpled chin and lifted his face so that I could kiss him. I could feel his pulse under my hand, I briefly wondered if it was my own but decided that I did not care, how could I care, when the dream was real, for now, for that moment between sleep and waking he was mine and I could kiss him for the first time in ten years. For the first time in ten years he was here, vital and alive and in my arms, and I held him tightly, as I kissed him and loved him and did not want to let him go.

“Bad dream," he asked, his lips were pressed against my cheek.

"Like you wouldn't believe." I told him. It was a bad dream, I decided, that I might have to live without him. He was naked, not even a skin suit to protect him from the residual radiation. It was meant to be safe but you never knew, so we had snowsuits that protected us, and allowed the station or ship to monitor our vitals. You showered with one on, that was the point, they were a skin suit, worn like a second skin over our own. Yet he was beautifully, gloriously naked, sprawled across the bunk, the velcro on the blankets had been undone and now they were bunched under his waist, and his eyes were the same colour as the room's walls, a hard grey hue between dark lashes, and his lips were spit slick.

He had always been beautiful but there was something impermeable about him at that moment, stretched out with his head on my shoulder and his back twisted, the curve of hip and length of thigh, the sleeping seahorse of his penis, darker than the rest of him, but inert then, ready to fill with blood if things progressed. I could feel the lub-thump of his heart, slower than mine, and the silky skin behind his earlobe that was pale like the inside of a seashell. “Is it time to get up already?” His voice sounded rough with sleep, but everything about him was fluid, from the dark hairs on his thighs to where his toe nails needed cut, I could feel the scratch of them on my shin. “Or can we go back to sleep?” I didnt’ say anything, i was cataloguing him, the pink nub of nipple, the shadow of abdominal muscles under the pectoral, the crease of skin where he was turned, the rougher skin of knees and elbows where most of him felt baby new. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Because you're beautiful," I answered.

He had never liked being called beautiful, beautiful was a girl word, a word for sunsets and canyons and ancient cathedrals. We’re men, he would laugh, we should have a word of our own, magnificent maybe, or epic, sepulchral. I told him that’s not what that meant and he just grinned, white teeth pressed together and gray eyes crinkled. In the years after I wondered if he had known what sepulchral had meant, and if he had chosen it deliberately. He was sepulchral; funereal; of the tomb or dead.

I lifted his hand and kissed the skin above the wounds on his wrist, I couldn't lose him again. I couldn't. It wasn't in me anymore.

"It’s just,” his voice was almost a whisper, “it's like you’re looking for something.”

“You're seeing things.”

“It’s like you're looking for something wrong with me, like you know something I don't and you're looking for proof. I don't like it.” I swung my legs out of he bunk and went to the small cabinet that contained the medical supplies. I pulled out a roll of gauze and went back to him. I wrapped his wrist tightly, so he lay there naked apart from the strip of white around his arm, beautiful, a dark shadow between his legs with his penis flopping as he turned, the hair ran up to his navel in a thick line, and his adam's girdle looked deep enough to hold water. My mouth watered as I remembered him laying in the sand in Taranto, limoncello running from his navel to pool in those hollows, for my tongue to lick up the sweetness, salt from the sea and the warmth of his skin. It was almost impossible to look at him sprawled like that and not want.

“You'd tell me, wouldn't you?” He sounded very small and afraid then, “if something was wrong.”

“Of course," it was a truth, not a protestation. Whatever he was, a manifestation, a hallucination, a psychological encystment configured by an alien entity I could not comprehend, he was perfect.

I found him some scrubs and tennis shoes, acutely aware that I was hungry. It had been well over a day since I had eaten. I went into the head to relieve myself and closed the door behind me. I wasn't gone for more than a minute before the door started to buckle, the plastic warping and then collapsing in on itself as if in a vacuum and Bucky stood there, with the doorknob in his hand, like it had the day we’d met, and a look of befuddlement on his face. “You were gone," he said, ignoring the broken door. "I was scared.”

“You broke the door, Buck," I said calmly, nothing surprised me anymore.

“I don't remember doing that," he was looking at the knob in his hand with some surprise. “I don't remember, Steve, is that what's wrong, is it... am I sick?”

“Of course not," I dismissed the idea immediately, “it's just a door. Let’s go get something to eat.”

Remembering that Bucky was as bad a cook as I was, and unsure if he even needed to eat anymore, I took a few cans of pre-prepared food and wolfed them down with three cups of coffee, that was burned and thin, like water on my tongue. He didn't take anything but twirled the plastic knife in his fingers, back and forth regardless of the sharp edge. “If you’re worried." I said, “how about we go to the surgery and run some tests, and I’ll show you, you're perfect.”

I knew my way around the surgery, every station was built exactly the same, it was deliberate, you knew one station you knew them all. The Company was clever that way, although the Eurydice station was old and had it's quirks, it still fit the same old blueprint.

I wasn't a medical doctor but I knew enough to pass muster. I tested his pulse, blood pressure, I freeze dried a few drops of his blood for basic testing, a few others to go through the centrifuge and was waiting for them to finish when the internal phone started to ring. Although it was connected to a camera the screen didn't engage when I pushed the button. “Rogers." That much was habit. I kept my eyes on Bucky, whilst i had worked he had been apathetic, sitting quietly, holding an empty coffee bulb and banging the ring on his thumb against the metal. He looked like he was exhausted by the events of the past few hours.

“You're in the surgery, finally." It was Lensherr. I heard what sounded like a sigh of relief. “You have a guest, eh?”

“Yes."

“And you’re busy?”

“Yes.”

“Fun ain't it?" I was certain Lensherr had lost his mind completely. In the papers I had read he had been brilliant, the best of his peers to earn a place on Eurydice, a master of metallics and magnetics, but now I wasn't sure he was capable. Part of me was terrified of him. It had been a long time since I had had to deal with the violently insane, but they were far more powerful than their frame suggested, and Lensherr looked strong, long and lean.

“What do you want? Perhaps we can play chess?”

Lensherr barked out a laugh. “Mackenzie wants to see you. That is, see us.”

“Alone?”

Lensherr laughed again, “visphone,” he said, “but I imagine he’ll cover the screen, video conferencing and all that. He gets shy.”

“Embarrassed, considering what we’re going through I didn't think it would matter.”

“Something like that." Lensherr murmured. “Maybe the old crack pot finally shattered. But yeah, what’re you doing in an hour or so?" Bucky was tap tap tapping his ring against my old coffee bulb. I couldn't help but remember I had buried the ring with him. “How’s life?”

“Lonely?” I wasn't in the mood for his bullshit. I felt like my mind was flying in a thousand directions at once and no matter how much I tried to grab at it, the more violently the pieces went. I reassured myself it was proof that I was not going mad, because if I was I wouldn't have cared.

"One minute,” there was a pause during which I heard a muffled, “stop that,” as if he was talking to someone else. I wondered who or what his visitor was. “Yeah, now’s not good for me, I’ll be in the mess, an hour or so, yeah.” Then he ended the call.

"Who was that?” Bucky asked.

“That? that's Lensherr, he works here too, he’s an engineer, a metallurgist, you don't know him."

“Is this going to take much longer?” There was a whine in his voice, he had used to wheedle to get his own way for things that didn't matter, chocolate cake instead of lemon, red wine instead of white, tequila instead of vodka, kisses on the neck instead of the shoulder. I knew that tone.

“Bored?" I put the last slide into the machine. "I don't think there’s much to do her.” I pushed the on button and turned completely, I had to wait for the results. Behind him, I could see one of the slatted windows. They had built these stations with lots of windows, they promoted mental health apparently. The sea was bluer than I had ever seen it, with lines of navy and blackness, but there was a wavering rich purple, the imperial purple called porphyria. It was alien and beautiful.

I turned my head to Bucky who was just opening his mouth in a yawn, but he turned it into a smile. “So how am I?”

“Perfect. Magnificent, sepulchral." I used his word, this body as frail as it seemed was indestructible, it looked human but it was not. I switched the monitors off and moved across to sit next to Bucky. I didn't care for the research, Bucky was here, vital and alive, if not human.

When we had travelled to Taranto we had made the decision, romantic as it seemed at the time, to go by train, taking the sleeper down from Berlin to Milan and then changing trains in the morning. It had seemed so wistfully old fashioned. We had booked a cabin and then both crowded into a single bunk any way. I remembered him rising above me, riding my cock, in the poor illumination of the reading light, as the train clack-clack clunked over the rails, causing my cock to jerk within him. He had his knees either side of my hips and was bearing down on my hands, fingers intertwined, before he wrenched one hand away as he was coming to ram into his mouth so no one would hear him scream.

There had been a scream anyway, in the next cabin, a woman, followed by “ _um Gottes Willen zu töten_ ” and “ _Ich gehe nirgendwo hin in der Nähe deinen Schwanz, während die Spinne noch am Leben ist,”_ and _“Es ist mir egal , wie viel die Tickets wurden, nicht bis zu diesem verdammten Spinne tot ist.”_ And then a period of silence followed by a shrill exclamation of _“es mich verdammt noch mal berührt, deshalb.”_

And Bucky sat above me, naked as a god, rocking himself against my hips, as the two of us laughed.

I loved him so much right then I could not countenance the very idea of life without him, as he lay next to me in the train bunk, a wet hand slowly finishing me off now the moment was lost to the poor woman next door and the spider that tormented her, but we laughed amongst kisses into each other's mouths. And then dozed to the clack-clack clunk of the train running over rails.

The rest of the journey had been horrendous.

Towards morning as the train ran through Austria we crossed a bridge over a ravine, it must have been a two hundred foot drop. Bucky had looked out the window and said, “imagine if I fell here," he said, “it would hurt twice as much, I'd be falling away from you and you would be pulling away from me, not because we chose it, but because of forces beyond our control. You couldn’t even stop to make sure I was dead.”

I told him he was being morbid, but the image lingered, of him falling down into the snow and the frozen river in a place in Austria whose name I did no know.

—-

_“We’ve talked, briefly," Charles begins that morning. He's wearing a gray suit with a black pinstripe, and a red ceramic poppy on his lapel. His tie is blue and his eyes are more vibrant than usual in the winter morning. He seems to have a little extra spring in his step, as it were, and he brought coffee with him, although Steve doesn't really drink it. It tastes wrong now. “About trauma, and PTSD.”_

_“You think I’m broken.” Steve doesn't mean it as an accusation but it comes out that way._

_“The human mind is a remarkable thing,” Charles answers, “but it's not immutable. In some ways, it's remarkably fragile and in others just plain remarkable." Steve didn't know if he chose that word deliberately or not, repeating it. “Sometimes we survive things unscathed that would destroy others, and then things that seem silly to others reduce us to our knees, I don't think you're broken, Steve,” He does not sound in the least repentant, "I think you survived and now we seem diminished, nothing is right. You had this vision in your head of what it would be when you got home, and the reality couldn’t really live up, regardless. You’ve handled it well, but there’s no shame in needing a little help, or someone to talk to.”_

_“You think I should talk to you.” Steve’s not sure he doesn't mean it as an accusation._

_“I think that's your decision.” Charles is unmoved. Sometimes Steve wants to get up and destroy this bland cubicle of a room, to tear down the dying fern from it’s perch atop the filing cabinet; use one of the comfortable chairs to put out the windows, throw the computer to the floor, to rant and rail and scream and fight, but he doesn’t. He knows it won't make him feel better nor will it move Charles to anything other than his persistent calm. “But if you won't talk to me there are others, many not affiliated with the Company, or even people who know what you’ve been through.”_

_"I hardly think any of those exist.” Steve scoffs._

_Charles’ smile is a slow sinuous thing. "Oh, I think you'd be surprised.”_


	3. A shining peace, under the night

_“Let’s try another track," Charles says in his quiet even Oxford voice. “You told me you like to read. What was the last book you read?”_

_Steve hates that he has to think about it. He carried that book around with him for months, traded it for a pulp novel with dog-eared pages and scraps of everything as bookmarks, that he never got to read. “Rebecca.” He answers._

_“Good book." Charles agrees, “the last one I read was the Night Circus. I actually finished it this morning and enjoyed it quite a lot, I’m certainly amenable to letting you borrow it, but I think we’d be better off discussing Rebecca for a moment.”_

_"I thought this was therapy, not a book club." Steve is not in the mood for Charles’ usual bullshit._

_“It is, but sometimes we can be more frank about books than ourselves." He is a well of calm and Steve wants to shatter him, to break him, to tear him down, but he doesn't know where to start. “Rebecca herself was a bitch, I alway thought it remarkable that someone could write a book so very much about someone who wasn't there.”_

_“What would you have done if I'd said the last book I read was The Night Circus?”_

_Charles smiles, "I would have brought it around. Books are an easy segue, most books are about failed romances. When we talk of the epic love stories they usually end up with obsession, madness or death, or all three. It makes it easy to talk about these things, we spend our lives looking for the one when all of our books, our songs, our movies are about what happens next, when we’ve found them and lost them, or they were serial killers, or” he pauses, “shot you in the back.”_

_“So you're saying it's not worth it?”_

_"No, not at all, I’m saying if it didn't hurt it wouldn’t be love.”_

—-

When the phone rang it was Lensherr, he had arranged the conference between the three of us, but the view screen was blank. That was not quite accurate, the view screen was black but I could see the line separating the screen into two, suggesting that the camera was covered not malfunctioning. I didn’t press. “I think," Mackenzie said, he had a drawling looping sort of voice, like old molasses in the snow, “we can all agree that we’ve been visited.” Both Lensherr and I made noises of assent. “And that we have all attempted to understand these .." he seemed lost for a word.

“Formations," Lensherr butted in, “it seems most appropriate, they’re not alive, in any conventional sense after all, so we can't really give them a name that reflects that. Even if the people they’re copying are alive they certainly aren’t. Their cells neither denature or decompose, they simply regenerate. So, yeah, I've been thinking about it, and I think, well, Formations seems most appropriate.”

“Dr. Rogers," Mackenzie continued, “would you like to share your findings?”

"Me," I was surprised, I was a psychologist, Mackenzie was the expert here. Hammond would have been better but I didn't know exactly what had happened to him, just that, like Erskine, he was dead, but unlike Erskine it wasn't self inflicted. I could feel Bucky’s eyes on me, like drill bits. “Everything is normal, except where it's not. It’s more than normal, as a copy it's too exact, it's too perfect, I’m guessing, I mean, I’m a psychologist, but it's like,” I paused, I had given some thought to this, “our building blocks are atoms, and atoms, although infinitesimal are made of smaller parts, it takes time for those atoms to regenerate because they are built of subatomic particles, it's almost like rather than being built with the clumsy bricks of atoms, they’re made of the smaller subatomic particles that allow for corrections in the copy, little things that seem irrelevant except when they are.”

I was certain I was talking madness, but it made so much sense.

“There is a lack of understanding, clothes made without fastening, sensitivity to scars that were dead before where the nerves have been mended, then there is the regeneration, blood samples atrophy and then restore themselves to fluidity. That’s hard to explain, but there’s also," I stopped again. “The memories, they’re wrong, he remembers things from after he died, and there doesn't appear to be an emotional attachment to the things he remembers, like they happened to someone else, or he watched them through glass, I’m not certain my," I paused, “Formation, doesn't remember what I remember of him, but if the opposite is true how can I explain his memory allocation.”

Lensherr cut me off with a warning, Bucky didn’t appear to be listening. It was more that he didn't seem to care. “Any ideas why these formations have appeared and not others, after all, doc, you’re the psychologist?”

“And you're the one who suggested the devil." I answered, “I’m in no more a position to know that than I am to understand the mind of god.”

“Enduring memory traces." Mackenzie said, “the manifestation of a figure that lingers more within our mindscape, like froth on a cup.”

“That would explain the memory disparities.” I agreed. I had an idea that Lensherr’s “formation" was either cretinous and unable to understand, or more brilliant than the engineer himself and thus I wasn't surprised when he cut us off again.

“My first thought," Mackenzie said, “was a short story by an author called Lovecraft, in it an expedition found an ancient lost city frozen in the ice and the frozen corpses of those who had lived there, but as they dissected them to understand their strangeness they too started to find members of the expedition dissected. Which expedition we are in that case, I do not know, but that we are the victims of an experiment I am quite sure now. The same formations appear, unimproved from their previous incarnations unaware of our previous attempts to remove ourself from them, or even what is harmful.”

“Which makes it a pretty shitty experiment." Lensherr offered. “Unless it is the inflexibility of the formations that's the point.”

“You’re suggesting,” Mackenzie spoke like he was giving a speech at the institute, “that there is an importance of individuality that is erroneous, there can be no individuality in the ocean structure, we are applying to it humanoid characteristics of which it must be void, it is, after all, not human, so attempts to judge it as such are folly at best. It is possible that we simply cannot comprehend the point of the experiment simply because we are.”

“You think a part of it, if not all, is unintentional, simply exploration unaware of how cruel it is.” I didn't phrase it or ask it as a question. I knew in that instant that that was what Mackenzie truly believed.

“There is certainly no malice, or villainy in it's creations, it is more like an old fashioned gramophone record, when it ends the needle returns to the start and the song plays over. Normally I would be hesitant to even suggest so much without much more rigorous testing but I am sure, beyond shadow of a doubt and with no more testing could I be made more sure, that Dr Rogers is correct about the manifestations of these Formations, if they are, as postulated, created from sub-atomic particles, notably neutrinos they are held together by an energy source which can be depleted.” I had noticed, in a strange passing fancy, that the covering on Mackenzie's screen was starting to slide, first a line of white, then as it fell away completely a large golden disk that after a few moments I realised was a straw hat. Mackenzie himself was a blunt faced man with sharp narrow eyes and a widow's peak erupting like a landspar from his oiled back black hair. I had moments to notice these things before the line was cut off abruptly.

—-

I was woken that night by the lamp switching on. Bucky was wrapped in the blanket at the foot of the bed, his dark hair falling across his face, and his shoulders were shaking silently as he sobbed. “Buck,” I reached out to touch him and he seemed to curl in on himself even more, “Buck, what’s wrong?”

“You don't want me." He said. "I heard it, I heard everything." His tears were large fat drops that clung to the dimple of his chin before splattering against my arm, hot and vital. “I heard how you think I should go away, I would, god I would, but I can't.”

“Buck," I took his hand, tear-wet and kissed his fingers, tasting the salt on my lips, repeating apologies, entreaties, promises. I could no longer bear a future that would not have him in it - if I could by virtue of promise or action convince him of this. I had lived ten years without him and given the chance would not endure another such day.

“Don't say that," he told me, “there's no need, I get it, you've changed, you're different, you don't want me, I know it, you’re not taking me seriously, like I’m a dream or a bubble that might burst, you won't touch me. When you were dreaming you called for me, you did, and I came, and now you don't want me.”

Bucky had always had these moments, these points where reality was too much and he broke down, and I had always reassured him it was okay, that I loved him, he was not alone, never alone, and I loved him, I did, to the point of madness, but it always cycled back to these moments. I was a psychologist I understood it, but it didn't make seeing it any easier. I was older now, wiser allegedly. “Buck, love, I’m going to tell you the truth, all of it.”

He looked skeptical but was prepared to listen. I had no doubt that if he wanted to he could jerk his hand away, he had with seemingly no effort broken the door to the head.

“You've changed, I’ve changed, change is normal, natural, but it's not always easy, and I understand that the way you've changed you can't be apart from me." I was aware of how patronizing I sounded but there was nothing I could do about it.

“You haven't changed," he said, “you're exactly the same as you always were, it's me, I've changed, there’s something wrong with me, maybe that," he was looking t the empty space where the head door had been.

“Do you sleep?” I asked him, urging him to lie beside me on the bed.

"I don't know.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, it blurted out before I could think about it, “just lie here, for a while next to me.”

“It’s not right, it's not real sleep, maybe I’m sick, I lie here and think,” he paused, “they’re really strange thoughts and I don't like them.”

I kissed his forehead. “We all have strange dreams.”

"I dream I’m a soldier," he said, “and there’s a war and a doctor, he does things. I don't like those dreams. He speaks German and I have to listen, and I don't like them. You’re so far away in those dreams, I know you’re not coming to save me.”

“They’re just bad dreams," I dismissed them. He buried his face against my shoulder, draping my arm over him and urging I hold him tighter and breathed in my ear, "I love you.”

I felt like screaming.

——

The note simply read, “Mackenzie wants more vigorous steps. I have no care either way any more, shit happens. L” He pressed it into my hand as he entered the library, behind me Bucky had found himself something to read but he kept himself within a small radius of me, perhaps a little closer than was necessary to reassure him that I would not simply vanish. “Bucky, this is Erik Lensherr, he’s one of the shyer members of the crew. You probably haven't met him before.” If Mackenzie was right then Bucky knew what I knew, but I didn't want to push it. Bucky was fragile after a sleepless, if he did sleep, night.

Bucky looked up at him, appraising him. “Pleased to meet you, I’m Steve's husband.” There was something snide and almost jealous there. Perhaps Bucky thought that the reason we were different was because of Erik.

“Pleased to meet you." Lensherr said, “I’m divorced, myself, lovely girl, red hair, temper to match.” He offered it as a salve and Bucky took it as that. He tried to define himself as not a threat, there was a time I would have understood exactly what Bucky was thinking but I didn't anymore. He had reminded me exactly how much I hadn't known him at all.

“Mackenzie let me know he has a plan, he knows what he's doing, he just wanted me to share. He's broken his visphone, I think it's deliberate." Lensherr talked like he had an allotment of words to impart in a short period of time, and he was running behind, everything fell out of his mouth quickly. “Something about an anti-neutrino field, he’s asked the Prometheus to wait at the satelloid, claimed it's a decon thing before we abandon the station.”

“And what do you think?” I asked him.

He flicked his eyes to Bucky. “Hell if I know.”

—-

_“You get quiet when we talk about him." Charles doesn't ask a question, it's a simple statement. Steve shrugs. “Are you embarrassed by how you feel about him?” Steve doesn't have an answer, he tries a few times but ultimately falls silent. Charles has an eerie percipience, almost like he can read Steve’s mind and it disquiets him. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the phrase the heart wants what it wants. I’m the last person who will judge you for loving a man.”_

_"I like women." Steve blurts it out, it’s true, he does like women, he likes the round swell of apple bottoms and the smell of powder and roses. He's old fashioned but he likes the line of a nylon up the curve of a woman's calf muscle and the arch of her foot in pumps._

_“But you like men too." Again Charles isn't asking. “There’s a word for it, you know, liking both men and women, it's not unusual. We call it bisexual." It's like a great weight has been lifted on Steve’s chest. “I can give you studies and articles that prove it, I can show you bisexual celebrities who have famously dated both, but I’ll keep it simple for now. There was a biologist, Alfred Kinsey, who looked into sexuality and proved, although in a simplistic way, that almost no one is entirely heterosexual or homosexual, and that without social pressures most people moved along a scale between the two in their lifetimes. Sexuality is a fluid thing, you might prefer women one day and men the next and it's normal, even though society tells us that heterosexuality is standard and anything else is abnormal. Some people don't experience attraction, some are sexually attracted to people they’ve known for a long time, and some to intelligence. There is absolutely nothing wrong with your sexuality except how other people make you feel about it._

_“I’ve been married to a woman, but it was a man that rewrote my life. I was young and he was beautiful, and angry, he has a soul like an open wound, and we come together and drive ourselves apart and I've never thought less of myself for loving him, though I did for desiring him. I didn't question how I felt in his arms, or how I loved having sex with him, but people judged me for it, called me queer. He hated everything so it seemed natural to him to defy everyone by loving me back, but we were destructive to each other. That doesn't mean I don't still love him, or that when we meet we don't fuck like rabbits, it just means that if we're together for any period of time bad things happen. He had a wife too, and loved her honestly. Bisexuality is not nearly as rare as people would like it to be.”_

_“Do you think I am?”_

_"I don't know, Steve, do you think you are?" Steve chews the word over in his mind, it answers so many questions, it's like the weight of the world is lifted from his shoulders, and he can suddenly breathe._

_“Yes," he says, "I think I might be. I think I loved him, no, I know I loved him, I desired him, I just didn't know what to do with it, I wasn't ashamed, I was just scared.”_

_Charles smiles, “then mourn him, he was the love of your life, you can be angry that’s he’s gone, you can lament the possibility of the life you didn't get to share with him, no one will think less of you, and if he was the only man you ever desired that’s okay too.”_

_“Why, Charles," Steve affects a manner, “are you flirting with me?”_

—-

There was a storm. It rattled the station on it's moorings and lit up the sky with brilliant flashes of lapis argent puissance that looked to be world ending. I had never seen anything like it and I stood there for long moments watching silver slashes cut open a sky the colour of old blood over a porphyria sea. I felt like the words I had to explore it were too small. Too human. When I turned around to show it to Bucky he was gone, I called his name but got no answer, so I left the room, my hand on the rail along the slatted window over the alien landscape, the colours staining the room. “Bucky," I called again.

I could hear footsteps, oddly heavy and human, with a sort of dragging susurration of the sole against the floor. I knew it wasn’t Bucky, and Lensherr moved as quiet as a cat for all his tics. “Erskine?" I asked.

I went to flick on the light but he stopped me with an entreaty. “There’s no need.”

“You’re dead," I told him.

“And you were late.”

“Are you really here?” There was a bark of laughter.

“You still think you're dreaming, like with Bucky?”

“Where is he?”

“How should I know?” It was a simple answer but it felt much larger than it should in the empty hallway with the dark shadow of a tall thin figure in front of me, briefly illuminating by the shattering sky.

"I think you do." I was angry, I had no other way of expressing that except at him. He was the reason I was here. He was the reason I was going through this.

"I’m not here instead of him if that’s what you’re thinking.” I had been thinking that, and now I felt almost abashed for having done so.

“What is he to you?" I didn't have an answer, “he’s not Bucky, not really, and he scares you, disgusts you in some ways, you can feel sorry for yourself but not for him, because you realise he’s always going to look like that, the gilded youth with storm grey eyes you called him all those years ago. Mackenzie is building the field annihilator, he thinks that you won't agree because you are attached, he’s right, isn't he?”

“Where is he?”

“Are you not listening, I’m trying to warn you.”

“Where is he?” I was getting angrier.

“I don't know, you need a weapon, you can't trust them, you mustn’t trust them. You don't have a choice here.”

“There’s always a choice." It was Erskine who taught me that, there was always a choice if something was so unbearable then death was always a choice. I wondered if he had taught it to Bucky too. I had a flash of rage that maybe Erskine was responsible, that Erskine had done this to Bucky, to me, to the station. “You can always do what I did.” I wondered if that’s what he really wanted all along.

I pushed past him as the sky clattered down outside the station, and he let me go.

Bucky sat in the well of a storage locker, there was blood frozen on his lips, and the flesh of his throat was eaten away, but his eyes were still alive, still retained that spark of life I had seen him without. He sobbed with an open throat, his hands useless at his side, there was an empty dewar flask on it's side beside him. I did not know what he had drunk only that it was highly caustic, eating away the meat of his tongue and throat and down into the hollow of his stomach. But even as I watched the skin rebuilt itself. It was wondrous and terrible and rendered me breathless. Even as he healed he convulsed and I could not reach out to touch or comfort him, I just stood there without air in my lungs. The dewar flask read O when I kicked it with my foot. It was more caustic than acid and still he was recovering. I was watching him as he had tried to kill himself, again, but this time he had no choice, Erskine’s option no longer applied, the skin grew back in flakes of dust even as the liquid oxygen ate away at him, and there was nothing I could do but watch.

At his fingers was the tape recorder that Erskine had left me, I didn't need to know what had been recorded, the record of Erskine's experiments, perhaps his own struggles with the teenage prostitute I had seen that first day, his conclusions of what she was, and how she had been killed and had always returned.

Bucky wasn't stupid, he just didn’t care for bookish things when there were things to be done, drinks to be tasted, food to be tried, experiences to enjoy. He liked to flirt and to dance and to run, he loved the feel of the sun on his skin, what use did learning have for one such as him. He was, like Erskine had called him, a gilded promise of youth and vitality and concupiscence, and earthy good humour. With that came the dark side, no one could shine so brightly without, the quiet times, the foul moods, the days he could not rise from his bed. There were the incalculable rages and the terrifying equanimity. They made him whole, but when I thought of him it was as that almost Grecian image of youth, of the embodiment not of human frailty but instead the triumph of earthly love.

Bucky did what he was always going to do, he figured it out for himself and made his choice.

“Do you want to die?” I asked him. I never could deny him anything. Although his head lolled, the muscles corroded, I could tell he was saying yes. “It’s true, love,” I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him, careful of the chemicals and not-blood splashed out, “you’re not like me, but not worse, the opposite in fact. It's because of that you didn't die.” He raised an eyebrow. His mouth was perfect, but his throat and chest were ruined, the oxygen burning it's way out as quickly as he recovered, “you’re basically immortal, well, much less mortal than me,”

His mouth formed the shape of words, “how awful.”

"Not so, we don't ever have to be apart again.” There was a tear running from the outside of his left eye. “You have a purpose, I don't know what it is, but you are remarkable and even more beyond my comprehension than you were before.”

“Fuck, first contact.” There was a breath with the shape of those words, not speech, not then, but an attempt at it.

"Looks like it, Buck, you never could do things by halves.” I chose to believe the sound he made was a laugh, not a sob.

—-

_“The odd thing about grief," Charles says, “is no two people react to it the same way, oh we talk about the five stages of grief but really, you react the way that you react and that’s it. If you need help we can medicate you, if you need to hit things we can find you a boxing gym, it's about doing what's right for you.”_

_Steve hates his calm. He wants to rant and rail, to weep, to scream, but none of those things happen. Instead, he picks at the fabric of his khakis, he's started to talk to Charles, in bursts and fits and spurts, and long periods of silence. Charles doesn't judge him._

_It would be easier if he did._

—-

The annihilator was a box, perhaps 15cm squared, a metal framework and inside it is a swarming blue radiance. It looks as alien as the ocean beneath them. Mackenzie had made an effort, showering and slicking back his black hair, it made his ears look pointed and the wedge shape of his face more prominent. His eyebrows were hard dark lines, and there was something of barely constrained violence about him. "I have questions before we start." He said.

“Lensherr, I have been with you for six hours now, and I am yet to see your guest," I turned to Lensherr, I found it odd that now I considered it I had not either. I had not seen his visitor, but I had been around him enough that I should have. Even if he had managed to arrange for their disposal, I did not know if the word murder applied, they should have re-manifested by now.

Lensherr scrubbed his hand over his head, “Anya, she’s in cold storage." He said, “deep cold, I found, well, it should be obvious, after the first attempts to kill her went so damn well, I stuffed her in the experiment freezer and set it to absolute zero.” He leans back in the chair, a long creature of restrained violence. “You don't know how she appears, she’s so thin," there was a dare in his voice, as if telling us to question him, “and her hair comes out in clumps, her nose is broken and her lips are cracked, it hurts her, so I smashed in the back of her head and set her to freeze, because d’ya know what, it's the only damn kindness I’ve ever been able to offer her.”

Mackenzie turned a screen towards him and tapped in a few commands, I didn't see what they were. “So absolute zero puts them in a state of stasis?” He was cold blooded, recording this like a scientist, like these weren't people, because they weren't, they were recreations, manifestations, facsimiles which were more human than human. I felt cold, the pin pricks of a thousand points of ice, it was not the sort of cold that made one wish for blankets, hot chocolate or even human warmth, but a sort of yawning precipice of non-existence that made one yearn for death. I envied Mackenzie his dispassion and then hated him for it.

Lensherr was manic, in his way, a thousand and one tics, gnawing at thumbnails, or lips, or picking at hang nails or the scabs over his knuckles. He had reacted with that mania with his visitor, his Anya. I did not know what Mackenzie's visitor was or where they were, all I had seen was a yellow sun hat. I did not know if it was even a woman or man, no a male or female. With Bucky sat next to me, holding my hand, I knew it wasn't him. It was a replica. I had to repeat that.

I thought of Lensherr’s description of Anya, starved and beaten and I wondered why, when Bucky and Erskine’s girl had appeared with an almost surfeit of health, she was so denuded. What made her so different? Was it Lensherr, or was it, now that I considered it, how he remembered her.

As Mackenzie tap-tap-tapped away on the screen's keyboard I became fixed on the idea that I was remembering Bucky wrong, that he was as I remembered him but not as he had been, but how he was poisoned by my memory of what he had done. Of course, he yearned for death, I realized, when that was how I remembered him.

Lensherr had been right, we were magnificent bastards to a man, forcing our understanding on the things around us, capable only of withstanding that which fit what we expected of it. We poisoned everything we touched with our arrogance. “Should I get her?” Lensherr asked, “I’ve not tried to wake her up before, I was so relieved that she just didn’t come back, and then I didn't know what to do, or what comes next.”

Steve felt like he was drowning, like there was icy fingers of water reaching around him, and the room was stained pink and lavender and gold, the box seemed so unremarkable on the table, a cube, the workings of which were electronic blue with wires of light and shifting parts, the glow of it settling on the table in abstract fractals of blues and grey. His feet felt numb in their tennis shoes, like they crammed into steel toe capped boots, and Bucky held his hand and said “he's alive,” and it made no sense as the light, lavender pink and gold rose around him, like an unholy beatification that had nothing to do with the eldritch ocean which had created him. “I choose this," Bucky said.

“I need a med team, stat," Mackenzie said, and then the lights switched off, black like a blanket spread over him, and then frost.

He was so cold. “Go," Bucky said, and Steve was standing, he didn't know when it happened, but he was standing and Bucky was falling, falling, falling.

With a bitten off scream Steve opened his eyes.

—-

_“So," Charles says in that calm, English accent of his, the one that is a wide equanimity that Steve wants to bring crashing down, “you woke up before the dream ended.” Steve hates the way he doesn't ask questions, just makes these statements of awful fact with the tenacity of a terrier._

_Steve takes a deep sighing breath through his nose but says nothing._

_“The box was on the table and it was going to solve everything, and the company woke you. It's likely," he leaned forward, “from what little information that I have, “that the dream started when they found you and reintroduced you to its proximity. Your brain trying to process what you went through, I doubt it was anything more. You said everyone in the dream was someone you knew.”_

_“Yeah, I worked with Hammond and Mackenzie on a few missions, Lensherr, well he stuck with me after we sprung him from..." Charles nods, understanding, “for a week he was my shadow, this skinny kid with shark teeth and his eyes, he’d wake up screaming and all the ammo would be floating around him, couldn't help it, I don't know what happened to him after that.”_

_"I do," Charles tells him, “I’ll make sure you get the information.”_

_“It’s been so long." Steve says, “he probably doesn't remember.”_

_Charles reaches across and takes Steve’s hand, “he does, believe me. People don’t forget that sort of thing.”_

_“Skinny little Jewish kid, that's how I saw him, but they’d done things to him, like they had to me, to Bucky, I just....” Charles sits back in his chair, listening. “That fucking box, I hope they left it in the ocean.” Yet Steve knows they didn’t, they wouldn't. Something like that, they know where it is, that's the kind of people Shield are. They’ll say it's to protect it from being misused, they might even believe it, but someone will use it, just as there is always a box, there is always a Red Skull. “They didn't, did they?”_

_"No.”_

_Steve knows that’s why they pulled him from the ocean, why it showed him Eurydice, because he’s Orpheus, and like Orpheus, he’ll sing for the gods long after the world is dead._

\----------—

IV. The Dead  
BY RUPERT BROOKE  
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,  
Washed marvelously with sorrow, swift to mirth.  
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,  
And sunset, and the colors of the earth.  
These had seen movement, and heard music; known  
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;  
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;  
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter  
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,  
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance  
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white  
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,  
A width, a shining peace, under the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To say this fic had legs implies a certain amount of momentum that's not quite right- this fic had legs like the luggage in Discworld. I wrote this all in about five days, with the 2002 movie's soundtrack on, and the knowledge I needed to write it but also that no one would read it, because well, the tags are nope-worthy.
> 
> However sometimes we have to deal with the nopes because I am strangely proud of this, it hurts in all the good ways.
> 
> Okay technical stuff
> 
> Mackenzie and Hammond are actually the original team from the golden age comics, the original human torch and namor the submariner - those are their canon names.  
> The story is - believe it or not- entirely canon! yeah I don't know how I pulled that off either.  
> Yes, in canon Cap saved Magneto from the death camps!
> 
> Charles is, obviously, Charles Xavier, and the Company is, and is not, Shield.  
> The story of Eurydice is one of the more popular variants of the tale.  
> Also I get really erudite in my language choices when I read Thomas Covenant, I probably shouldn't switch between it and fanfic again.
> 
> The poem is from 1915 and was part of a sequence of 5 poems by the same poet used to glorify war although that's clearly not what they were about, titles were changed to better suit the government's propaganda. It is, as you might guess, the fourth of five.

**Author's Note:**

> The premise of this fic is after waking up after crashing the plane Steve goes into therapy with Charles Xavier (who is doing it as a thank you from Erik whom Cap saved from the death camps) it is interspersed by what is later revealed as a hallucination/dream caused by the tesseract whilst he was in the ice. In this hallucination Bucky killed himself, but the space station, Eurydice, recreates him. The first time he appears Steve kills him, the second time he tries to kill himself and fails. The dream is disrupted by him being found in the ice.  
> The vast majority of the story is Steve on the station with the false bucky's, Lensherr, Hammond and Mackenzie.
> 
> Jim Hammond and Namor Mackenzie are the original team of superheroes from the golden age comics. Lensherr is merely a character he sprang from the camps and was aware of a power within.  
> Reference is made throughout both narratives of "The Company" this is Shield and suggest neither Steve or Charles trust them.
> 
> The poem Steve refers to in chapter 1 is IV. The Dead by Rupert Brooke, which is where the title is from, and chapter titles. It's a sonnet.


End file.
